A cacophony of words, a rage of similes, and a dash of awkward poetry. You know, to keep it classy.

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Sometimes, people at work say things that crack me up, not because what they say is particularly funny, but because of who is saying it (and sometimes it’s a mix of both).

Today I had one of those moments.

I was going to refill my water, and I ran into a coworker who is a very fantastic lady. She reminds me of a younger version of my man-friend’s grandma, because she’s just spunky and warm and so very caring. (She’s actually one of my favorite people to talk to at work, and the following is a great example of why).

I made a casual comment about her putting on her coat – something along the lines of, “Heading out?” – and she stares at me for almost too long, so I thought I had maybe said something wrong.

Then she smiles at me and says, “I almost pulled a Cartman, but then I thought that that wouldn’t be right in a professional environment.”

I laughed a lot, because it was just the last thing that I would have expected her to say. It really just made my day.

So, I’ve recently come across some extremely mixed feelings when checking my twitter feed in the morning, and all of them have to do with live-tweeting.

On the one hand, I completely understand why actors would want to live-tweet their show – It makes fans feel more connected, it gives fans an inside look at the making of the show (much like DVD commentaries, which I personally love), and it’s a free way to promote themselves.

On the other hand, people who follow live-tweeters end up with pages upon pages that look like this:

I love me some J-Pad (Although not as much as Jensen Ackles), but he is frequent live-tweeter and filler-upper of my twitter.

It also means that people who choose to/have to record a show on their trusty DVR could have spoilers ruined for them when they check twitter (with no warning), so it’s really only beneficial for folks who are on twitter while they watch their shows.

Personally, when I am watching a show that I love, I don’t have my eye on my phone – I’m actually watching the show. Not to smack people who do feel the need to multitask while watching TV; I just prefer to give all of my attention to a show, because it allows me to enjoy it a bit more.

But, even without watching the show, it is still interesting to hear about what was going on behind the scenes, and actors are generally pretty humorous about everything, to further enhance the viewer’s enjoyment of the show.

Hence, I am torn; I love/hate live-tweeting, and I don’t know if I should embrace the background information on a show I haven’t watched yet or weed out the live-tweeters from my twitter feed.

As I’ve said before, I enjoy structure in my pleasure writing – haikus, sonnets, whatever – I find them more fun for the challenge of the structure that is necessary.

I also create poems out of spam, lovingly called my Spam Haikus, which is pretty self-explanatory. Here is something a little different – this one started as a haiku, but there were so many cool words that I wanted to incorporate that I had to make it longer, so it’s more like my other versions of spam haikus.

I do this because I enjoy it, and it gives me a little mental exercise that is lacking in my day-to-day work life. It’s nice to get out and stretch every now and again, isn’t it?

It is difficult –
Your desires are vivid,
Little and ambitious.

Your usual delight
is juicy and simple –
Happy to use
a mass of fact for relaxation.

Better off saying “no”,
Sparing time and dreams
that can require
urgent and difficult
thinking.

Sometimes I get a little pissy at the world in general, and call out people I hate and the dumb shit that they say. After that, I want to make it up to the world by reminding them (and myself) that there are people who I don’t hate who say lovely things on social media sites.

Everyone has a few people on the social medias that they used to work with/go to school with/met once at a party who you friended because you had a bonding experience, but you don’t expect to ever have a face to face conversation with that person ever again. Most of the time, it’s completely acceptable to let them hang around for a year or so, and then unfriend/unfollow/un-whatever them after they say something particularly stupid or obnoxious.

I happen to be lucky enough to have a few of these people who I refuse to get rid of, because they light up my news feed with some real gems. Such as:

After reading that article on Jezebel about gender-neutral baby clothes, and getting into some of the comments, where people said that everyone compulsively asks a baby’s gender, I think I’ve come to the decision that if I’m ever toting a baby around and someone asks if it’s a boy or girl, I’m just going to look blankly at them and shrug like I have no idea.

Love it. She also goes on to call babies “small sentient marshmallows that leak fluids”, so you know she’s fun to peek in on every now and again.

Anyone else find it creepy that Blanche called her father “Big Daddy”?#GoldenGirlsMarathon

Yes, it is creepy. And yes, I do love that I have friends in their 20’s who still marathon Golden Girls.

And I leave you with this lovely video, added by an acquaintance on Facebook. It’s pretty fantastic, and I would never have known about it if it weren’t for Facebook (which may be a goo thing or a bad thing, depending on your opinion of foxes and their vocal habits).

Recently, I was listening to a podcast by a friend of mine, in which she and her husband discuss pop culture tidbits and other awesomeness. I enjoy listening to podcasts to and from work, because it makes the drive go by faster and it makes me feel like I have friends in the car (it gets lonely, guys).

In the episode that I listened to the other day, though, my friend’s husband was discussing a book that he wrote (props to him, man) in which the main villain was an evil doctor. Because of this, he was referred to as The Doctor throughout the book, which caused a lot of negative feedback from people who are super fans of Doctor Who.

Now, fans of Doctor Who, or Whovians, are a special kind of fan, in that they are obsessive to the point of crazy, and highly defensive of negative ideas or portrayals of pretty much any character from the show (even villains can cause a soft spot in Doctor Who – Whovian life is not always black and white).

Because of this obsessiveness, I can completely see people taking his story the wrong way, being offended that the villain is called The Doctor (“How dare you use that name for someone evil!”), and hurt by the fact that he didn’t know that in Doctor Who, the main character is referred to as The Doctor, which is common knowledge for people who have see the show (but not common knowledge for anyone else).

Original photo co. BBCAlso, I just re-watched “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, and I absolutely love this line.

Now, I personally identify with Whovians, because I love a good story (and they really are fantastic in Doctor Who), but I can also see where he was coming from. Fans of Doctor Who can be crazy, and that can be a huge turn off.

I myself was hesitant to start watching Doctor Who at first, because I knew people who were so crazy in love with the show that I couldn’t imagine it to be that good, and I would only end up disappointed. I’ve been burned by crazy fans before (a former roommate told me to read Twilight, because “the story is kind of lame, but the writing is really good”. Lies.), and I wasn’t really looking to put myself out there for a show that I wasn’t already attached to.

So I get it – crazy fans are crazy, and they can easily turn people off of a show, movie, comic, book, whatever. It’s a fine line being a fan of something. You have to ease people into it, like stepping into a hot bath – dip their toes with a clip or two, and hope that it is comfortable enough for them to want to slip in.

The thing about fandoms is, people are always going to be fanatical about them. That’s the point – they love this thing so much that they can’t help but want to push it onto you too – they want to share their wonder with the people around them, so they can wonder together.

But shows are not the fandom – the boy who builds his own life-size dalek, the couple who have a Star Trek wedding at Comic Con, or the girl who writes erotic fanfiction of Supernatural and tries to publish it – they are not a representative of the thing itself, or even the fandom. They are the extremes.

So please, don’t judge a thing by it’s fandom – you could be missing out on something life-changing.

So, for my job, I manage my company’s many Facebook pages. We have a company profile page to log into to manage these pages (it’s just a person page named after our company), and sometimes stupid people friend us instead of liking the page (don’t ask me why).

I tend to troll trough the news feed of these people looking for articles to link or whatever. Occasionally, though, I come across something that someone says that is so irritating that I feel the need to punch someone or smash my head on my desk. To make myself feel better, I’ve started collecting their inane words so others can see the obnoxious stupidity that prevails in my life.

Warning: These may make you angry (if you are a decent human being. If you aren’t then you probably agree with these people and wonder why I would point out their status updates as strange).

Being gay is a sexual choice, not a race of people.

This same person later said:

Teaching your children to be racist is a form of child abuse.

Apparently teaching your children to hate homosexuals is not.

People always say thing like I barley go on or I’m deleting my FB or accounts of any kind but why don’t they tell the truth I know have Those time but wtf

I honestly couldn’t tell you what this is supposed to say. I spent a good three minutes rereading it, and all I can tell is this person hates grammar, spelling, and people who complain about social media.

Omg u kno whts gr8? When ur happy

It hurt to type this out.

Anyone have a remidy to stop pucking and shitting at the same time.

That’s not English, and anything with a spellchecker on it would have at least made the spelling proper.

So, yes. I just wanted to share with the world the awful things that I have to deal with on a fairly regular basis, both at work and in my free time. Spelling properly is not that hard, people, especially when everyone’s phone/computer/Google glasses* have spell check.

*I’m actually not sure if Google glasses have a spell check, but I feel like they should, right?

So, as most of my friends and family know, my man-friend and I recently became engaged. After five years of dating, it’s less of a shock and more of a relief for most people, removing the unknown “when?” from everyone’s minds when they think about us.

Now that I’ve mostly adjusted to wearing a new ring (and rearranging my other rings to accommodate the new sparkly), I’m able to give everyone what they’ve been waiting – and asking impatiently – for since it happened; The Story.

It started with a phone call after work. I was on my way home, and my man-friend called me up to ask me if I wanted to go out to a local bistro that happens to be a particular favorite of ours (and not just because his sister works there and sometimes gets us free stuff).

His reasoning? “I didn’t feel like cooking dinner, and we haven’t been out in a while.” Both logical reasons, because:

Due to our schedules, he gets home before me most days, and therefore he is usually the one to make dinner (and it sucks to have to do that every day, so I don’t blame him for wanting a day off) and

We are trying to save our money to be able to pay off our student loans early, so we rarely go out to dinner.

Of course I agreed, because who doesn’t like to go out to dinner? So when I got home, we put the dog away and immediately left, meaning that we were both in our nice work clothes (perfect timing on his part, if I do say).

We got to the restaurant (Spoiler alert: He doesn’t do it during dinner), and we sat in his sister’s section so we could chat with her for a bit. We had delicious bread, delicious dinner, delicious drinks – honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had anything bad here, so it’s always a good place to go. We laughed and talked and had a general good time (*salutes* General Good Time).

Afterwards, my man-friend suggested that we go for a walk around the lake to help us burn some calories. We had been trying to eat better and exercise more, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary.

We went over to the lake, and it was a little chilly, so no one was there – it was just the two of us walking around.

He started to act a little weird as we were walking, pointing out a dog across the water and ducks up ahead and things like that. He just kept jumping from subject to subject, which was unusual, to say the least. He also had his left hand in his pocket the whole time, which meant that he was pointing with his right hand. That was weird because we usually hold hands when we walk around (shut up, we’re cute), and we couldn’t because of all of the pointing.

I told him that I wish I had grabbed his jacket, because it was getting a little too chilly for me (I was in short sleeves), and he stopped and said he had a surprise for me. He asked me if I wanted it now, and since I had put the nervousness and the pointing and the hand-in-the-pocket together, I knew what was happening and said yes.

He pulled out the ring, and before he had a chance to get down on his knee (or even get the question out), I grabbed him in a big hug and started tearing up. He asked me, and I couldn’t get a response out for a while, because emotions. Finally he said, “I’m so nervous!” So I got out a yes, and he pulled away so I could actually see the ring (I only saw it briefly before the hug and the crying happened).

It’s beautiful.Also, he picked out the ring himself. He told me later that he was going to get a different one, but he saw this one and knew. 🙂

We hugged, we kissed, he was relieved, I forgot about being cold. It was amazing.

After that, we had the enormous task of telling our parents, siblings, grandparents, etc. Some we could tell in person, some got texts or phone calls, but eventually everyone heard about it that night.

Except for my mother.

See, she had chosen that week to go on a cruise, and didn’t have her phone turned on due to being in international waters and ridiculous charges and the like. I sent her pictures of us and the ring, but she did not get them until three days later when her boat came back to the country, which meant that we weren’t able to put anything on Facebook (the keeper of all of the knowledge) until then, because I didn’t want her to find out through social media. That kind of thing is okay for friends and extended family, not really okay for parents.

Finally she got back and found out, and finally we were able to put it up on Facebook, and finally we were able to make the small part of the world that we live in explode in congratulations and happy dances in public. It was no lip synced dancing video, or video with Zach Braff, or photographed event, but it was us, and it was wonderful.